I'd like to have my "by artist" view split by first letter, however the setting under Preferences>Tools>UPnP>Server>Content only allows for this setting to be universally applied via item count, which would screw up my use case of listing all songs by genre then shuffling between them, thus harshing my mellow. Is there a way to set split tree node by first letter by view, instead of item count?

The problem is that you cannot manipulate constructions such as %<artist>% with title formatting, so if you want multi-value artist tagss split in that way, the only option is to use the built-in setting.

On the other hand, if the artist values in your tags are all single-value, you can create a spec containing something as simple as one of the following:

CODE

$left(%artist%,1)$left($stripprefix(%artist%),1)

You can also use those for multi-value artist tags, but the drawback is that if your next tier has %<artist>%, then all artists in a multi-valued tag will be listed under the first letter of the first value, e.g. if artist=John Doe; Fred Bloggs, then it will return